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As America's influence & prestige declines worldwide…

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: December 27, 2017, 11:26:58 am »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

Foreign leaders say U.S. losing stature

Trump claims he's boosting American influence, but many policy experts see a country in retreat.

By TRACY WILKINSON, ALEXANDRA ZAVIS and SHASHANK BENGALI | 3:00AM PST - Tuesday, December 26, 2017

President Trump visits Saudi Arabia in May. Some leaders worry about Trump's unpredictability. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.
President Trump visits Saudi Arabia in May. Some leaders worry about Trump's unpredictability. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.

WASHINGTON D.C. — China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has taken over Syrian peace talks, also once the purview of the American administration, whose officials Moscow recently deigned to invite to negotiations only as observers.

France and Germany are often now the countries that fellow members of NATO look to, after President Trump wavered on how supportive his administration would be toward the North Atlantic alliance.

And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S., once the only mediator all sides would accept, has found itself isolated after Trump’s decision to declare that the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

In his wide-ranging speech on national security last week, Trump highlighted what he called the broadening of U.S. influence throughout the world.

But one year into his presidency, many international leaders, diplomats and foreign policy experts argue that he has reduced U.S. influence or altered it in ways that are less constructive. On a range of policy issues, Trump has taken positions that disqualified the United States from the debate or rendered it irrelevant, these critics say.

Even in countries that have earned Trump's praise, such as India, there is concern about Trump's unpredictability — will he be a reliable partner? — and what many overseas view as his isolationism.

“The president can and does turn things inside out,” said Manoj Joshi, a scholar at a New Delhi think tank, the Observer Research Foundation. “So the chances that the U.S. works along a coherent and credible national security strategy are not very high.”

As the U.S. recedes, other powers including China, Russia and Iran are eagerly stepping into the void.

One significant issue is the visible gap between the president and many of his top national security advisors.

Trump's national security speech was intended to explain to the public a 70-page strategy document that the administration developed. But on key issues, Trump's speech and the document diverged. The speech, for example, included generally favorable rhetoric about Russia and China. The strategy document listed the two governments as competitors, accused the Russians of using “subversion” as a tactic and said that countering both rival powers was necessary.

Russia reacted angrily: America continues to evince “its aversion to a multipolar world,” said President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov.

At the same time, Trump's refusal to overtly criticize Russia, some diplomats say, has emboldened Putin in his military actions in Ukraine, where Russian-backed rebels are battling a pro-West government in Kiev. Kurt Volker, the administration's special envoy for Ukraine, said that some of the worst fighting since February took place over the last two weeks, with numerous civilian casualties. Volker accused Russia of “massive” cease-fire violations.

Nicholas Burns, who served as a senior American diplomat under Republican and Democratic administrations, said the administration's strategy was riddled with contradictions that have left the U.S. ineffective.

Trump “needs a strong State Department to implement” its strategy, he said. “Instead, State and the foreign service are being weakened and often sidelined.”

Trump's “policy of the last 12 months is a radical departure from every president since WWII,” Burns said in an interview. “Trump is weak on NATO, Russia, trade, climate, diplomacy. The U.S. is declining as a global leader.”

The most recent example of U.S. isolation came with Trump's decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, delighting many Israelis, but angering Palestinians and reversing decades of international consensus.

On Thursday, an overwhelming majority of the U.N. General Assembly, including many U.S. allies, voted to demand the U.S. rescind the decision.

For the last quarter-century, successive U.S. governments have held themselves up as an “honest broker” in mediating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Trump insisted he is not giving up on a peace deal, but most parties involved interpreted his announcement as clearly siding with Israel.

“From now on, it is out of the question for a biased United States to be a mediator between Israel and Palestine,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a summit of more than 50 Muslim countries that he hosted in Istanbul. “That period is over.”

Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, said that if a peace deal is to be made now, “it won't be from American policy.”

“Trump took himself and the administration out of the peace process for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Trump had boasted of his ability to convene Muslim leaders during his trip to Saudi Arabia in May, but that would seem far less possible today. In Jordan, arguably Washington's closest Arab ally in the Middle East, government-controlled television has started 24-hour broadcasts of invitations to follow a Twitter account whose hashtag roughly translates as “Jerusalem is ours … our Arabness.”

Regional leaders and analysts also say that for all of Trump's tough rhetoric, they see few concrete steps by the U.S. to counter Iran's steady expansion of its military, economic and political influence, a perception that Iranian leaders are happy to exploit.

“Trump is ranting and making empty threats,” said Hamid Reza Taraghi, a conservative Iranian politician with close ties to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Russia, China and Iran are gaining ground in the Middle East, and America is losing ground and influence.”

That view is also shared by Iranian moderates, with whom the Obama administration thought it could work.

“The reality on the ground in the Middle East is that the American administration has failed to form an efficient coalition against its self-proclaimed enemies,” said Nader Karimi Juni, an independent Iranian analyst who writes for reformist dailies and magazines.

“Now Russia is celebrating its victory in Syria, and America is watching as an onlooker,” Juni said.

In Syria and Iraq, the U.S. under Trump has succeeded in helping its allies drive Islamic State militants out of their strongholds. But Washington has opted to take a back seat in the other conflicts roiling the two countries.

Another round of recent U.N.-mediated and U.S.-backed peace talks on Syria wrapped up in Geneva without any progress. Instead, a Russia-led process is gaining traction.

Even some longtime opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad quietly acknowledge that Sochi, the Black Sea resort where Russia aims to convene a “Syrian people's congress” next year, and not Geneva, will be the focus of efforts to bring an end to the war.

Trump has won praise in parts of South Asia, a region his team has re-dubbed the “Indo-Pacific” and where it is favoring India and Afghanistan over Pakistan. The administration has asked Congress for $350 million in aid to Pakistan for 2018, not quite one-tenth the amount Washington provided five years ago.

Afghan officials say they are encouraged by Trump's renewed pressure on neighboring Pakistan to take “decisive action” to stop militant groups operating from its soil.

“Our partnership, which reflects a renewed U.S. commitment, will set the conditions to end the war and finally bringing peace to Afghanistan,” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's office said in a statement.

But even there, officials say they worry that Trump's bellicose rhetoric will strengthen China's status as a power broker.

China has also benefited from Trump's refusal to join other nations to work against climate change. Even as Trump removed climate change from the list of threats menacing the United States, China announced it would begin phasing in an ambitious program to curb carbon emissions by establishing the world's largest market for trading emissions permits.

Trump was not invited to an international climate summit hosted earlier this month by French President Emmanuel Macron because of his decision to pull the United States out of 2015 international climate deal.

“You cannot pretend to be the guarantor of international order and get out of [an accord] as soon as it suits you,” Macron told France 2 TV.


__________________________________________________________________________

Los Angeles Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson, Alexandra Zavis Zavis and Shashank Bengali Bengali reported from Washington D.C., Beirut and Mumbai, India, respectively. Special correspondents Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran, Omar Medhat in Cairo and Samir Zedan in Bethlehem, West Bank, contributed to this report.

• Tracy Wilkinson has covered wars, crises and daily life on three continents. Her career began with United Press International, where she covered the Contra war in Nicaragua. She moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1987, first as a writer on the Metro staff, then as a foreign correspondent based in San Salvador. In 1995, she moved to Vienna, where she covered the war in the Balkans, winning the George Polk Award in 1999, and then to Jerusalem. From there, she went to Rome, where she covered two popes and did several stints in Iraq. In 2008, she became Mexico bureau chief, where her coverage was part of a team Overseas Press Club Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Wilkinson was also the 2014 winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Award for coverage of Latin America. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University. Her book The Vatican's Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century has been translated into a dozen languages. She joined the L.A. Times' Washington, D.C., bureau in 2015 to cover foreign affairs.

• Alexandra Zavis is a writer and editor on the Los Angeles Times' Foreign Desk who has reported from more than 40 countries. She spent a decade with the Associated Press, covering Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other war-torn places. Since joining the L.A. Times in 2006, she has served as a Baghdad correspondent and as a California reporter covering poverty and veterans issues. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Diplomacy's Arthur Ross Award for distinguished reporting on foreign affairs and was part of teams of reporters awarded the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award for foreign correspondence and APME's International Perspective Award. She is a graduate of Oxford University and City University in London.

• Shashank Bengali is the Los Angeles Times' South Asia correspondent, covering a stretch of countries from Iran to Myanmar. He joined the L.A. Times in 2012 as a national security reporter in the Washington bureau. He has reported from more than 50 countries since beginning his career with McClatchy Newspapers, where he served as a foreign correspondent in Africa and the Middle East. In 2016, he shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the L.A. Times staff for coverage of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. Originally from Cerritos, California, Shashank holds degrees in journalism and French from USC and a master's in public policy from Harvard. He lives with his wife in Mumbai, India.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=fcf8de93-b191-434a-b706-da1315616bbd
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« Reply #1 on: December 27, 2017, 11:41:17 am »


The above article was published on the front page of the print edition of the Los Angeles Times.

One day, Donald J. Trump may work out that America has lost most of its influence & prestige in the world, and I guess that will be when the Thucydides Trap will be sprung and the world could potentially suddenly become an extremely dangerous place as the Jesuslanders (with a maniac residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) react to the new reality.
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« Reply #2 on: December 30, 2017, 07:52:52 pm »


from The Washington Post....

The decline of U.S. influence is the great global story of our age

Trump's administration is foolishly withdrawing the country into self-centered isolation.

By ZAREED ZAKARIA | 7:51PM EST - Thursday, Deember 28, 2017

President Trump turns to talk to the media during a Christmas Eve video teleconference with members of the mIlitary at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.
President Trump turns to talk to the media during a Christmas Eve video teleconference with members of the mIlitary at his Mar-a-Lago estate
in Palm Beach, Florida. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.


DANIEL KAHNEMAN, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for reshaping our understanding of human motivation, once said: “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” That's as true for nations as for individuals. Countries have always oriented themselves within a larger international story. But what is today's global story?

For decades, the great overarching narrative was the Cold War. Almost every nation acted or reacted in the context of that ideological, political and military struggle. Then came 1989 and the collapse of communism. For the next 20 years or so, the opening up of the world — globalization — became the dominant thread, as countries jostled to become hot new markets and Western democratic capitalism seemed inevitable, undergirded by U.S. power and prestige. The attacks of 9/11 dealt a sharp blow to this benign narrative and, for a while, Islamist terrorism seemed to be steering the course of history. But terrorism has proved too weak and limited a force to be the big global story.

So what is it now? I would argue that the largest trend today is the decline of American influence. Not the decline of American power — the country remains economically and militarily in a league of its own — but a decline of its desire and capacity to use that power to shape the world. The current administration seems intent on dismantling the United States' great achievements — as it is doing with the World Trade Organization — or to simply be uninterested in setting the global agenda. Donald Trump will be the first president in nearly a century to end his first year in office without having held a state dinner for a foreign head of state.

And this erosion of U.S. global leadership is already causing other countries to adjust.

This month, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel declared that “the most important changes affecting our Western world and, indeed, the world as a whole” stem from “the United States' current withdrawal under Trump from its role as a reliable guarantor of Western-influenced multilateralism.” That shift, he noted, “is accelerating the transformation of the global order … and the risk of trade wars, arms races and armed conflicts is increasing.”

For Europe, Gabriel argued, the situation is almost existential. Since the end of World War II, he said, “Europe had been an American project in the United States' clearly understood interests. However, the current U.S. administration now perceives Europe in a very distanced way, regarding previous partners as competitors and sometimes even as at the very least economic opponents.” He urged Europe to take its fate into its own hands and decouple itself from U.S. foreign policy.

Consider also the speech in June by Canada's foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, in which she thanked the United States for its seven-decade-long stewardship of the international system and strongly implied that, under the Trump administration, American leadership of that system had reached its end.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech to the 19th Communist Party Congress in October that reflected his recognition of these new realities. “China’s international standing has risen as never before,” he noted, and the nation is “blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization.” Xi announced “a new era … that sees China moving closer to center stage and making greater contributions to mankind.” In previous speeches, he suggested boldly that China would become the new guarantor of the global trading order.

This, then, is the global story of our times. The creator, upholder and enforcer of the existing international system is withdrawing into self-centered isolation. The other great supporter and advocate of the open, rule-based world, Europe, has not been able to act assertively on the world stage with any clear vision or purpose and remains obsessed with the fate of its own continental project. Filling the power vacuum, a host of smaller, illiberal powers — Turkey, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia — are surging forward in their respective regions. But only China truly has the wherewithal and strategic prowess to potentially shape the next chapter of the story of our age.

A decade ago, I described a “post-American world”, brought on not by the decline of the United States, but by the “rise of the rest.” That world is indeed coming to fruition because other countries are prospering, but the changes are being dramatically accelerated by the Trump administration's foolish and self-defeating decision to abdicate the United States' global influence — something that has taken more than 70 years to build. As the president might tweet, “Sad!”


• Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. He is also the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for The Atlantic.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: What we learned from the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress

 • Trump's national security strategy ignores the lessons of Europe's bloody history

 • Glimpse of a post-American world

 • Is war between a rising China and a dominant America inevitable? A thought experiment.

 • How Trump could avoid the Thucydides Trap


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-decline-of-us-influence-is-the-great-global-story-of-our-times/2017/12/28/bfe48262-ebf6-11e7-9f92-10a2203f6c8d_story.html
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« Reply #3 on: January 03, 2018, 12:21:33 pm »


from The Washington Post....

The South China Sea fell off Trump's radar last year.
He may have to pay attention in 2018.


Chinese construction has continued at an accelerated pace, despite a tribunal ruling against it.

By EMILY RAUHALA | 1:27PM EST — Monday, January 01, 2018

The ship Tian Kun Hao is launched at a port in Qidong in China's eastern Jiangsu province. China has unveiled Asia's largest dredging vessel, and the South China Sea may be its first base of operations. — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
The ship Tian Kun Hao is launched at a port in Qidong in China's eastern Jiangsu province. China has unveiled Asia's largest dredging vessel,
and the South China Sea may be its first base of operations. — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


HONG KONG — President Trump railed against a lot of things in 2017. Chinese construction in the South China Sea was not really one of them, despite his campaign tough talk.

Focused on North Korea and evidently enamored of President Xi Jinping, the voluble U.S. president said relatively little as China continued to build on disputed islands, rocks and reefs.

A recent Chinese report hailed progress in the South China Sea last year, noting construction totaling 290,000 square meters, or 72 acres. That included work on hangars, missile shelters and large radar and sensor arrays, according to satellite images reviewed by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, a U.S. think tank.

China claims nearly all of the South China Sea. In 2016, an international tribunal ruled against those claims, but the finding has largely been ignored — both by the Philippines, which brought the case, and by Beijing.

Having added thousands of acres to the Spratly Islands in recent years, China is now building out bases there. Once operational, these outposts will enable the Chinese military to better patrol the South China Sea, potentially changing the regional balance of power.




It is both a territorial dispute and a test of regional influence, with an increasingly assertive China often appearing to set the terms.

Though Chinese reclamation and building predate Trump, many expected the Republican president to push back more forcefully than the previous administration.

The National Security Strategy released last month does say China's “efforts to build and militarize outposts in the South China Sea endanger the free flow of trade, threaten the sovereignty of other nations, and undermine regional stability.”

But experts see few signs the issue is a White House priority.

“Nobody in the White House is super focused on South China Sea stuff, at least as far as we know,” said Julian Ku, a law professor at Hofstra University School of Law and an expert on the South China Sea. “I think it's going to remain on the back burner, and that's definitely going to help the Chinese.”

The administration's quiet approach gave China a “free pass” in 2017, ceding ground at a critical time, said Jay L. Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea.

“If China does base ships there and move in weapons, it will complete their planning, it will make permanent their dominance of the South China Sea,” he said. “Because once they do that, they won't be pulling back.”

In 2018, that may create new challenges for Trump.

As a candidate, Trump cast China as an always-winning upstart that ought to be cut down to size.

China will “go in the South China Sea and build a military fortress the likes of which perhaps the world has not seen,” he warned in 2016. “Because they have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country.”

But in his first year in office, Trump has been the one showing respect, heaping praise on China's authoritarian president.


President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping participate in a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 9th. Trump called the red carpets, military parades and fancy dinners that were lavished upon him “magnificent”. — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.
President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping participate in a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 9th.
Trump called the red carpets, military parades and fancy dinners that were lavished upon him “magnificent”.
 — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.


A readout from his November visit with Xi said Trump raised the issue of the South China Sea, but he did not stress it publicly. In Vietnam, Trump casually offered to mediate — though there did not seem to be any takers.

The president's approach so far has been to regularize the type of Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPs, that the Obama administration authorized in 2015. May saw the first FONOP of the Trump era, when a destroyer, the USS Dewey, sailed within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands. There have been several since.

A spokesman for the National Security Council said the FONOPs program challenges excessive maritime claims by various states to preserve free movement on the sea and in the air.

The problem, experts said, is that FONOPs have thus far failed to stop Chinese building — and are therefore unlikely to stop whatever comes next.

“FONOPs are not a full strategy,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“It was not enough in the Obama era and it's not enough under Trump,” Glaser said.

Though Trump has given no clear signs that he plans to make the South China Sea a priority in 2018, his hand may be forced.

The president's push to get China to rein in North Korea is not going according to plan. He has said as much on Twitter. In the months ahead, he will probably face pressure to take a tougher line with Beijing.

“We know that the Pentagon, unlike the Trump administration, is very much worried about the South China Sea,” said Richard Javad Heydarian, a Manila-based security analyst. “The Pentagon is looking at options to bring the fight to the Chinese and up the ante there.”

The question is what the Chinese side does next.

Most experts say they believe China will press ahead with both civilian and military building projects. Having constructed facilities for planes and ships, it may soon start rotating them through on a regular basis.

Beijing could declare what are known as “straight baselines” in the Spratlys. These are in effect perimeters connecting the outermost points of a group of islands, turning the sea within into “internal waters”. In the case of the Spratlys, straight baselines would enclose features occupied by other nations.

China declared straight baselines in the Paracel island chain in 1996 and has in recent years signaled that it may do so in the Spratlys, a move that would be hotly contested and would almost certainly draw a U.S. response.

A less likely scenario would be Beijing beginning to dredge near Scarborough Shoal, a disputed, U-shape reef not far from the Philippine coast.

Since Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016, China has held off land reclamation there. If the Xi-Duterte truce falls apart, Beijing could decide to start, crossing what has long been seen as a U.S. red line.

Any of these moves would require the United States to rethink the status quo and take South China Sea strategy off “autopilot”, said Glaser of CSIS.

“There is not enough thinking about what the U.S. will do to deter or respond to what will be the next Chinese actions in 2018,” she said.


Shirley Feng in Beijing contributed to this report.

• Emily Rauhala is China correspondent for The Washington Post. She was previously a Beijing-based correspondent for TIME, and an editor at the magazine's Hong Kong office. In 2017, she shared an Overseas Press Club award for a series about the Internet in China.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • What Donald Trump talks about when he talks about China

 • Beijing's claims to South China Sea rejected by international tribunal

 • China is the winner in the GOP debate


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-south-china-sea-fell-off-trumps-radar-this-year-he-may-have-to-pay-attention-in-2018/2018/01/01/b7c9a27a-eb1e-11e7-956e-baea358f9725_story.html
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« Reply #4 on: January 11, 2018, 08:17:37 pm »


A recent example of America's waning prestige & influence in the world....





....long may the decline continue.
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« Reply #5 on: January 11, 2018, 10:14:51 pm »

the un is useless
trump should kick them out and unfund them
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« Reply #6 on: January 11, 2018, 10:20:09 pm »


I agree....the UN should move to Europe and expel America, including from the Security Council.

And I'm sure China will love to fill the vacuums created by the Americans waning influence in the world.
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« Reply #7 on: January 29, 2018, 11:15:29 am »


from The New York Times....

At Davos, the Real Star May Have Been China, Not Trump

While President Trump reassured business leaders that he wanted trade to continue,
Beijing extended its economic reach to Latin America and the Arctic.


By KEITH BRADSHER | Sunday, January 28, 2018

Liu He, a top economic policy advisor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, drew a full house to his presentation during a meeting of global business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland. — Photograph: Gian Ehrenzeller/European Pressphoto Agency.
Liu He, a top economic policy advisor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, drew a full house to his presentation during a meeting of global business
and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland. — Photograph: Gian Ehrenzeller/European Pressphoto Agency.


DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — President Trump used the World Economic Forum meeting to woo investors and business leaders by reassuring them that “America first does not mean America alone”. But it was clear in Davos, Switzerland, this past week that geopolitical momentum lay with Beijing, not Washington.

At one end of town, President Michel Temer of Brazil welcomed an unexpected offer from Beijing for Latin American nations to work closely with a Chinese initiative, known as the Belt and Road, intended to spread its economic and diplomatic influence abroad.

At the other end of town, a senior Chinese diplomat helped introduce the prime minister of Pakistan at a breakfast meeting. Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi used his talk to praise the rapidly expanding Chinese investments in his country, including to build power stations and a large port.

One of the best-attended speeches at the forum was that of Liu He, a member of China's ruling Politburo, who promoted the Belt and Road initiative, also known as One Belt, One Road. Participants here said the Chinese initiative was already rivaling more established, traditionally American-led, international institutions.

“The China One Belt, One Road is going to be the new W.T.O. — like it or not,” said Joe Kaeser, chief executive of Siemens, the German industrial giant, referring to the World Trade Organization.

Belt and Road takes its name from the idea that Beijing is spreading its influence along the ancient Silk Road that once linked imperial China to the Roman Empire and to the medieval Europe of Marco Polo. But that was not the only push to extend its presence abroad that Beijing was trying to showcase.

On Friday, the Chinese government used a policy document issued in Beijing to call for a “Polar Silk Road” that would link China to Europe and the Atlantic via a shipping route past the melting Arctic ice cap.

Belt and Road has been a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Xi Jinping, and his promises of a “China Dream” of restoring his nation to past greatness. Unveiled in Kazakhstan in 2013, Belt and Road started as a plan to revive economic, investment and diplomatic links across Central Asia.

The plan gradually extended to include the Mideast, Europe and eastern Africa, with Beijing promising hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in highways, rail lines, ports, power stations and other infrastructure, much of it through loans from Chinese state-owned banks.

Critics have been skeptical, arguing that projects bankrolled through the initiative will bury the recipients in debt and cause environmental damage. The initiative has also been criticized as an easy line of financing for authoritarian regimes. China says its projects will be environmentally and financially sound, and that it does not seek a say in how other countries are governed.


The foreign minister of Uruguay, Rodolfo Nin Novoa, right, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi last week in Montevideo, Uruguay. — Photograph: Andres Stapff/Reuters.
The foreign minister of Uruguay, Rodolfo Nin Novoa, right, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi last week in Montevideo, Uruguay.
 — Photograph: Andres Stapff/Reuters.


While Davos was underway, China was making other efforts to stretch the geographical ambitions of its Belt and Road initiative even further. At a summit meeting for Latin American and Caribbean foreign ministers in Santiago, Chile, Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China called for close cooperation and participation by the region's countries, although he stopped short of formally including them in the initiative.

In Davos, President Temer of Brazil said that he was not concerned about the rising influence in South America of China, which has increased investments in his country and extended enormous loans to Venezuela and Ecuador.

Venezuela has already proved unable to repay its creditors, which include Moscow and Beijing. The Russian government has used Venezuela's overdue debts as a bargaining chip to win the right for Russian warships to visit Venezuelan ports.

Mr. Temer said the debts should be seen as a financial issue, not a geopolitical one. “The major concern they have is to recover the loans they gave Venezuela, they want their payment,” he said in an interview. “This was actually quite explained in the meetings we have.”

He also said that he was not worried by the strong Chinese interest in acquiring stakes in Brazil's electrical distribution and other industries. “The U.S. invests as well in Brazil,” he said.

National leaders seemed to vie with one another in Davos in calling for closer cooperation with China. Mr. Abbasi of Pakistan dismissed recent controversy in his country over whether China's giant construction projects were compromising Pakistan's sovereignty, its environment or its financial stability.

“There is no major challenge we have not been able to resolve, and the sovereignty issues are very clear,” he said at a breakfast for business executives and the news media. He added that on financial and environmental issues relating to Belt and Road projects, “So far, I can tell you we are winning on both counts.”

Chinese officials used Davos as another opportunity to speak out against protectionism, in what analysts have described as an effort to take advantage of global concerns about the Trump administration and its warnings that it would pursue a more aggressive trade policy.

Beijing's rhetoric comes despite China's steep tariffs on a broad range of manufactured goods, including shoes and cars. China's average tariffs on imports are actually triple those of the United States and double those of the European Union.

However, China has zero tariffs on many raw materials that it has in only limited quantities at home, like iron ore. As a result, its stance has been particularly welcomed by countries like Chile that produce a lot of raw materials but relatively few factory goods.

“In this, we see a very big difference with the United States,” Foreign Minister Heraldo Muñoz of Chile said, calling China's “vision of openness and its rejection of protectionism very welcome.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

• Keith Bradsher is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Shanghai bureau chief for The New York Times, having reopened the Shanghai bureau on November 14th, 2016. He has previously served as the Hong Kong bureau chief and the Detroit bureau chief for The Times. Before those postings, he was a Washington correspondent for The Times covering the Federal Reserve and international trade, and a New York-based business reporter covering transportation and telecommunications for The Times. Born in 1964, Mr. Bradsher received a degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar. He received a master's degree in public policy with a concentration in economics from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Prior to joining The New York Times, Mr. Bradsher wrote for the Los Angeles Times from 1987 until 1989.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • China Reaches Into the Heart of Europe

 • A Sober Trump Reassures the Davos Elite

 • Trump Arrived in Davos as a Party Wrecker. He Leaves Praised as a Pragmatist.

 • Behind China’s $1 Trillion Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/business/davos-trump-china.html
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« Reply #8 on: January 29, 2018, 11:22:57 am »



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« Reply #9 on: January 30, 2018, 11:21:51 am »

You are living proof that if you immerse yourself in lefty media you will suffer serious brain rot and become a babbling obsessive twit.😁.     

                   
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« Reply #10 on: January 30, 2018, 01:11:34 pm »

aDjUsToR you are being far too kind lmao Grin
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« Reply #11 on: January 30, 2018, 03:02:58 pm »



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« Reply #12 on: July 28, 2018, 04:11:00 pm »




from The Washington Pot…

Trump is robbing America of what makes it great

The anti-government rants have gotten dangerously out of hand.

By JEFFREY SACHS | 2:22PM EDT — Wednesday, July 25, 2018

President Trump at a “Made in America Product Showcase” event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C. on July 23, 2018. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
President Trump at a “Made in America Product Showcase” event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C. on July 23, 2018.
 — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


AMERICAN PROSPERITY since World War II has been built upon science and technology breakthroughs spurred by a powerful innovation system linking the federal government, business, academia and venture capital. U.S. innovation policy has been successfully emulated in Europe and Asia, most recently by China. President Trump's trade war against China aims to slow China's technology ascent but is misguided and doomed to fail; instead, American prosperity should be assured by doing what America does best: innovating at home and trading with the rest of the world.

The founding text of U.S. postwar prosperity was Vannevar Bush's report Science: The Endless Frontier. In an act of brilliance, America's greatest president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked his science advisor how the great scientific advances spurred by the military during World War II (semiconductors, radar, servomechanisms, computers, cryptography, aeronautics, nuclear science, new medicines and more) should be made public for postwar civilian use. A lesser president would have asked the opposite: how to keep military advances secret after the war.

Bush's answer was inspired. Out of his thinking, directly and indirectly, emerged the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and federal aid to education. A new science-based industrial policy was born, one that also benefited dramatically from the arrival of Europe's greatest scientific minds, chased to America by Hitler and the war.

The U.S. government, wrote Bush, should now take this further and launch a coordinated, large-scale program of scientific education, support for university research, public laboratories and funding for basic science and government-academia-business partnerships for technological advancement.

Postwar military and civilian research and development were intertwined. Great universities such as MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and others engaged in federally funded research, and innovations first pioneered with defense spending were encouraged to find civilian outlets. The achievements were perhaps most remarkable in the emerging digital sciences and information and communications technologies, including computer science, transistors and integrated circuits, microprocessors, the Internet, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The Cold War spurred the innovation machine in ways best exemplified by the “Sputnik moment” that followed the Soviet launch of Sputnik and then former President John F. Kennedy's 1961 call for a moonshot. American math and science education was greatly boosted. (I myself was a lucky beneficiary of the “new math” of primary and secondary education in the 1960s.) The moonshot, successfully achieved within JFK's timeline (“before this decade is out”), yielded massive and lasting benefits in countless technologies including computation, telecommunications, space sciences, materials science, energy systems, medical sciences and more.

Few argued during World War II, the moonshot or the advent of the Internet that the federal government was incompetent and a drag on technology. That great lie emerged first with the demonization of government by the Ronald Reagan administration and enabled the private sector to harvest the profits from government-led innovation. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for example, carried out their pathbreaking work on National Science Foundation funding and then became mega-billionaires as they privatized the results. In an earlier era, polio-vaccine developer Jonas Salk and others thought it natural to turn their inventions over to the public without private patents attached.

The anti-government rants have now gotten dangerously out-of-hand, causing Trump and know-nothings in the Republican Party to denounce science itself. They attack government scientists who present findings that deviate from Republican lobbies (such as the coal, oil and gas industry). They undermine public support for government investments in research and development. All of this now gravely threatens the U.S. innovation system itself.

In the meantime, American technology successes have been noted by other governments. Silicon Valley became the place to emulate, and there are now many science-and-technology zones in university towns across Europe and Asia churning out breakthroughs. The U.S. no longer stands head-and-shoulders above the rest.

Global growth is now spurred by three major poles of “endogenous” (tech-led) growth: the United States, the European Union and Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea), plus various smaller dynamic locations including Singapore, Israel and others. We should expect still others to join in global innovation. There is no American monopoly on brainpower, excellent training and cutting-edge scientific know-how.

China's rapid technological advance has stunned U.S. policymakers, especially in the national security apparatus. The “Made in China 2025” program is a brash, confident and yet utterly realistic statement of China's intention to develop the key technologies of the 21st century in advanced computation, robotics, renewable energy, precision medicine, agriculture and low-carbon transport. One of the most significant is China's ambitious plan to pioneer a worldwide renewable electricity grid — the first of its kind and scale. Trump's trade war aims to scuttle China's impertinence.

Yet Trump's approach is profoundly misguided. There are three truths about China's technological vision. First, China is filled with brilliant young people who are equipped with excellent universities, ample government funding and private-market outlets for their energies. China's technological verve will not be stopped by Trump. Second, China's advances will benefit, not harm, the world, including the United States, by bringing forward new and highly beneficial technologies like zero-carbon energy, smart vehicles and more powerful computers.

Third, and most importantly, China's inevitable advances will in no way prevent the United States from making similar progress, but only if Trump and the Republicans drop their anti-science stance, support the American system of government-business-academic innovation and direct efforts toward the true needs of the 21st century, notably zero-carbon energy and non-polluting industries. There is no future in trade wars, hot war or the polluting industries of the past.


__________________________________________________________________________

• Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. His forthcoming book, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, will be published in October.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

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 • A Chinese world order

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 • Anticipating Putin's next war

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 • Trump just gave Putin complete free rein


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/07/25/us-china-2
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« Reply #13 on: July 28, 2018, 05:50:08 pm »




from The Washington Post…

China is laying the groundwork for a post-American world order

A China-led world order would be based on interests, not values.

By NATHAN GARDELS | 11:32AM EDT — Friday, July 27, 2018

A map of the new Silk Road, connecting Asia to Europe. — Illustration: Maxiphoto/Getty Images.
A map of the new Silk Road, connecting Asia to Europe. — Illustration: Maxiphoto/Getty Images.

AS the United States abandons the postwar multilateral system it once led, China is stepping into the breach, laying the groundwork for a post-American world order.

We are already getting a glimpse of what is to come through China's various initiatives, ranging from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to the Belt and Road project and the 16+1 group, which is developing Chinese-financed projects in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. China is also seeking to connect a global electricity grid powered by wind and solar as a means to sustain development while fighting climate change.

This new order will not be like the old. At least for now, it is not multilateral but comprised of multiple bilateral relationships linked to the Chinese core. And given China's “one world, many systems” perspective, it is based not on a convergence of values, but of interests.

President Xi Jinping has cast these initiatives with a positive spin as building “a community of shared future for mankind.” The most cynical critics regard them as a thin fig leaf disguising China's quest for global dominance and merely a means to find markets for over-production as its domestic economy slows. Xi's vision is also clouded by manifold reports of debt overload and kickbacks for corrupt leaders. In Sri Lanka, China has taken over a port it built because Sri Lanka couldn't afford the debt. The same dynamic seems to be developing in Pakistan and Laos; the new Malaysian government, meanwhile, has put its Chinese-financed rail project on hold, citing corruption and disadvantageous terms negotiated by the previous regime.

There is no mileage in being naive about China's ambitions and its self-interested motives. But lining up with hostility against China's initiatives the way Joseph Stalin and his minions did toward the Marshall Plan after World War II — which did wonders for a devastated Europe while also benefiting the United States through purchases of imports from American companies that were required to cross the Atlantic on American merchant ships — is a mistaken course for the West. And let's not forget that the American expansion of railroads westward in the 19th century also led to a crisis of corruption and over-indebtedness. Despite the turmoil and losses, when it was all sorted out, the result in the end was a connected continent that became a foundation of American prosperity.

Twenty years from now, the same will likely be true of Eurasia and Africa as a result of China's initiatives, even with all of their faults. That is why, to diminish the down-sides, the proper stance would be for the West to join with China's efforts at global development so that the process is more transparent and less corrupt, with terms that don't foster debt traps and amount to creditor imperialism. The experience of the “clean, lean and green” AIIB, which many Western nations — though not the United States — have joined, shows that high standards can be imposed if the West is a participant instead of an outsider as the new order is being built.

After all, it is not as if Western nations on their own are going to finance and construct infrastructure around the world. No one needs reminding that the United States has been unable to build a single high-speed rail project anywhere on its vast territory. By and large, it can't even manage to finance the repair of old infrastructure, much less invest in anything new. The European Union remains mired in deep disagreements about how to manage its own internal finances.

While critics carp from the sidelines, those in need of help are grateful. “When we were faced with financial crisis, amidst the wider challenges of the E.U., China helped us,” Greece's former prime minister George Papandreou recalled in a recent conversation with me. “China was one of the few nations to buy our sovereign bonds. This was an important vote of confidence. Then China began its investment in the Port of Piraeus, an early investment that is now one of the major components of the new maritime Silk Road. These investments showed great trust in my country's capacity to overcome the crisis, where few others would.”

In The WorldPost this week, we address these issues of a growing vacuum in the world order and China's attempt to fill it, for good and for ill.

Ali Wyne sees the demise of the American-led postwar order as less a consequence of President Trump's wrecking ball and more a victim of its own success. That order, built to avoid another devastating world war among major powers, achieved its goal. Along with an open trading regime, it was this stable absence of global conflict that enabled China's peaceful rise.

The result of success, Wyne contends, has been a complacency that has eroded the founding urgency that sustained a broad and deep commitment of states and their publics. That makes revitalizing the order a challenge. “The modernization of the world order would ideally result from farsighted diplomacy,” writes Wyne. “It is more likely, though, that policymakers will do little more than push for incremental improvements to an inadequate system” thereby allowing “forces — ranging from external challenges to populist uprisings — to continue testing its foundations. The potential result of indefinite erosion — a vacuum in order, without a coherent alternative to replace it — is unpalatable.”

Noting that the creation of new orders has historically followed upon cataclysmic events like the world wars, Wyne concludes: “In a nuclear age, though, it is terrifying to consider what might have to occur for a new order to emerge.”

To the extent that China is fostering an alternative to the vacuum, Jonathan Hillman doesn't like what he sees. “The Belt and Road is a masterstroke in geopolitical advertising. Wrapping the effort in Silk Road mythology, Xi is effectively selling a Sino-centric order to the world,” he writes from Budapest. “In practice, the Belt and Road is a sea of bilateral deals between China and participating countries, including many markets where few others dare to go. More than half of the countries participating in the Belt and Road have sovereign debt ratings that are either junk or not graded. China's emphasis on building big-ticket infrastructure projects resonates with foreign leaders looking to impress at home and establish a legacy.”

For Hillman, this mix of a debt trap with the megalomania of corrupt local autocrats will not spell stability and progress but a costly waste of resources as nations become tributaries beholden to Chinese largesse.

As China extends its influence globally, it will inexorably be drawn into local conflicts, just as the United States was in its period of dominance. “For decades, Beijing refrained from meddling with sovereign nations' internal affairs,” Denise Hruby writes from Juba, South Sudan, where the China National Petroleum Company owns a 40 percent share of the country's largest oil fields. “As long as economic ties flourished, it would turn a blind eye toward human rights abuses and corruption. But with increasing investments abroad comes more clout, and as the United States scales back its international commitments, China is emerging as an obvious development partner.”

Hruby reports that while China initially sought a direct role in ending the South Sudan conflict, which threatens its investments, it was soon overwhelmed by the complexity of militia and tribal politics. China fields its largest contingent of U.N. peacekeeping forces there, but it has reverted to a stance that “African problems must have African solutions” and looks to the African Union and other local mediators to resolve the crisis while it stands on the sidelines.

Jeffrey Sachs sees Trump's effort to staunch China's newfound influence while abandoning America's own successful model of development as achieving the opposite of its intent. “American prosperity since World War II has been built upon science and technology breakthroughs spurred by a powerful innovation system linking the federal government, business, academia and venture capital,” he writes. “U.S. innovation policy has been successfully emulated in Europe and Asia, most recently by China. President Trump's trade war against China aims to slow China's technology ascent but is misguided and doomed to fail; instead, American prosperity should be assured by doing what America does best: innovating at home and trading with the rest of the world.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Nathan Gardels is editor in chief of The WorldPost, a joint venture between the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • China used to stay out of other nations' politics. But not here.

 • George F. Will: The American president is no longer the most powerful leader in the world

 • VIDEO: The American president is no longer the most powerful person in the world


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« Reply #14 on: September 24, 2018, 11:47:38 pm »


from Aerospace Daily & Defense Report…

U.S. Hypersonics Face Uphill Struggle
To Match China, Russia


The U.S. faces an uphill battle for hypersonic supremacy,
warns Michael Griffin, the Pentagon's new undersecretary
of defense for research and engineering.


By GUY NORRIS | Friday, September 21, 2018

Chinese hypersonic missile. — Illustration: Wikipedia.
Chinese hypersonic missile. — Illustration: Wikipedia.

ORLANDO — While the U.S. may have woken to the emerging threat of Chinese and Russian hyper velocity weapons, the nation still faces an uphill battle for hypersonic supremacy, warns Michael Griffin, the Pentagon's new undersecretary of defense for research and engineering.

Citing technical hurdles, infrastructure neglect and the legacy of “taking a decade-long holiday from the exigencies of great power competition”, Griffin says the tally of critical challenges confronting U.S. hypersonic developers is “a surprisingly longer list than you might think.”

A staunch advocate of hypersonics, Griffin says the issues go well beyond the traditional technical challenges of aerodynamics and propulsion normally associated with high-speed flight. His broad line-up ranges from concerns over the robustness of the supply chain for key technologies like thermal protection systems (TPS) to the poor state of the underfunded U.S. national test infrastructure.

Having “ceded ground” to potential adversaries Griffin says the U.S. also “needs an overarching national strategy, which I cannot honestly say is in place yet. We need to know what the time phasing is, what we are going to deploy early, what we are going to be working on mid-term and to have in place by 2030.”

Speaking at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics International Space Planes and Hypersonics conference here, Griffin says the need for improved TPS capability is highlighted by limits to the performance of the U.S. Navy's recently tested Intermediate Range Conventional Prompt Strike Flight Experiment-1 (CPS FE-1). Fired from a submarine on October 30, 2017, from the Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii, FE-1 collected data on hypersonic boost-glide technologies and test-range performance for long-range atmospheric flight.

Managed by the Navy, this Office of the Under Secretary of Defense program is paving the way for a potential range of hypersonic CPS concepts, and will fully transition to the Navy in 2019. “It is a really critical program and the range with which we can project our will with it is pretty impressive — it's 1000s of kilometres. But it could be more if we did not feel we were limited by TPS technologies,” says Griffin.

Although the U.S. pioneered TPS developments for re-entry vehicles and the space program, the challenges of boost-glide and air-breathing hypersonic vehicle thermal protection are even greater because they must sustain thermal peak loads that are higher and longer than either re-entering spacecraft or ICBMs. “Our industrial base for TPS technologies and the development of new such systems has waned,” says Griffin. “We have national labs capable of producing one-offs, but our industrial base capable of producing this sort of thing for a living I'm told is two small companies.”

Other key challenge areas include guidance and navigation without GPS. “You need to think about how your hypersonic systems will get from where they start to where they need to be without GPS. I have suggested things like landmark tracking, terrain databases and star trackers, but they've got to stare through the plasma sheath,” he adds, referring to the blocking barrier of ionized particles that can build up around a vehicle in the upper atmosphere at high Mach numbers. “It's a problem we have to solve.”

Terminal guidance and updating the vehicle about last minute targeting data en-route is also critical. “Suppose the target moves. We need to be able to go after mobile launchers and mobile assets. The final element of terminal navigation needs some kind of seeker capability. But what wavelengths do I want to use when to look outside, and do I need more than one? Can I analytically correct for atmospheric distortion? How are we going to marry conventional seeker technologies with long range hypersonic systems to put power assets right where they need to be? These are systems problems.”

Griffin says deployment of hypersonic weapons will also require better integrated systems of command and control (C3), and datalink technologies better than todays. Techniques using laser and optical systems “could be critical in this area,” he adds. “If we ever use hypersonic weapons we will be fighting with them as a fleet in waves, and we don’t want to attack targets that have been nullified. So successive waves take advantage of things they learn from the earlier waves.”

“The integration of computational power with the C3 challenge will be critical. These vehicles will fly 10-15 minutes towards targets with information provided by — where? A host of nodes of low-flying low earth orbit constellations, ships, aircraft and unmanned air vehicles. If I have my way our future fire control systems will not be in one spot. We have to fight as a fleet and present no single target. We need them [adversaries] to know there is no single target they can take out which will render us deaf, dumb and blind. That challenge is a natural marriage with artificial intelligence and machine earning. We need to adapt some of that for our needs — targeting is an AI challenge,” says Griffin.

On the Issue of the test and development infrastructure, Griffin notes “it is no secret we have allowed our hypersonic and aeronautics facilities around the country broadly speaking to degenerate. They are not in good shape. I was told recently we have tests stacked up at NASA Langley to be executed because for this [speed] regime it is THE remaining wind tunnel.”

Allied to this is the challenge of ramping up the pace of flight testing. Describing the present tempo of flight test as “appalling”, Griffin says “we have over the last decade or so done five flight tests or maybe half a dozen. Over the same period the Chinese have done several dozen. I don't care how smart we are and how much we learn in any one test, but the operational tempo — the pace of testing — is itself important. We need a lot more flight testing at a more rapid pace to get the culture in place,” he adds.


__________________________________________________________________________

Guy Norris is a Senior Editor for Aviation Week, based in Los Angeles. Before joining Aviation Week in 2007, Guy was with Flight International, first as technical editor based in the U.K. and most recently as U.S. West Coast editor. Before joining Flight, he was London correspondent for Interavia, part of Jane's Information Group. In 2013 the Jesse H. Neal award for Best Technical Content was awarded to Guy Norris and Graham Warwick for their Advanced Propulsion feature. He received the 2015 Lauren D. Lyman Award for outstanding achievement in aerospace communications. And in 2018 he was awarded Technology Writer of the Year by the judges of the Aerospace Media Awards. Guy is also a multiple winner of the Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award in the Air Transport, Propulsion and Systems/Technology categories, and in 2006 he received the Royal Aeronautical Society Decade of Excellence Award for sustained achievement in aerospace journalism. Amongst other works Guy has authored the aerospace section of a science encyclopedia and co-authored, and produced an educational aviation CD-ROM. Guy has also authored more than a dozen books on the histories of Airbus, Boeing and other airframe manufacturers.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Can U.S. Match New Chinese And Russian Nuclear Weapon Technology?

 • Classified Report On Hypersonics Says U.S. Lacking Urgency

 • How F-22 Is Deconflicting U.S.-Russia Operations Over Syria

 • Iran, North Korea's Missile Tech Changing Threat Calculus

 • Rafale Fighters Make Inroads Against U.S. Makers


http://aviationweek.com/defense/us-hypersonics-face-uphill-struggle-match-china-russia
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« Reply #15 on: September 25, 2018, 03:41:07 pm »

its so funny that they can all destroy the whole earth another slow news day?
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« Reply #16 on: September 25, 2018, 10:01:54 pm »


Watching America aircraft carriers get destroyed by hypersonic missiles fired by China and/or Russia could be a very entertaining spectacle.
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« Reply #17 on: September 27, 2018, 02:07:54 am »

cool then watch everyone get wipped off the map that will bring on global cooling except you die
hahahaha you fucken retard

who cares everyone is dying it starts when you're born
did you think you would live forever?
if so
wonder if you get to serve your demon forever in hell?
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« Reply #18 on: September 30, 2018, 12:40:30 pm »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times…

‘America first’ isolates it at U.N.

Trump fails to win over nations, and many are poised to forge on without U.S.

By TRACY WILKINSON | Saturday, September 29, 2018

President Trump, speaking on Tuesday at the U.N. General Assembly, gained little global support for his hard-line policy proposals. — Photograph: Richard Drew/Associated Press.
President Trump, speaking on Tuesday at the U.N. General Assembly, gained little global support for his hard-line policy proposals.
 — Photograph: Richard Drew/Associated Press.


WASHINGTON D.C. — President Trump's second appearance at the U.N. General Assembly did not get the response he probably sought from the 193 countries gathered in New York this week.

Some leaders and diplomats openly laughed at his boasts. He failed to win support for his hard-line policies on Iran, Venezuela, an international war crimes court, climate change and migration.

French President Emmanuel Macron scolded him, accusing him of abandoning the foundation of today's world order and global cooperation enshrined by the U.N. itself.

In the end, Trump's “America first” agenda meant America was mostly alone during his four days at the U.N. this week.

Leaders who once courted Trump, attempted to gain his ear, or tried to persuade him to support global institutions that long were U.S. foreign policy priorities, made clear they would forge on without him on multiple issues of concern.

When Trump and his aides sought to unify the world against Iran, for example, European allies disagreed with his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. They even joined Russia and China to announce a payments system intended to circumvent U.S. sanctions.

And when Trump chaired a Security Council meeting that he initially had wanted to focus on threats from Iran, he sat in silence as leader after leader praised the landmark disarmament deal he had quit, and the need for global cooperation.

In his General Assembly address, Trump similarly criticized a new U.N. pact aimed at easing the global refugee and migration crisis, saying “migration should not be governed by an international body” but by individual countries.

That drew almost no support. Officials noted that virtually every nation had signed the accord except the United States and Hungary.

Some pushed back against Trump's exhortation of patriotism and national sovereignty over globalism and multilateral efforts to combat the world's ills.

“This path of unilateralism leads us directly to withdrawal and conflict, to widespread confrontation between everyone, to the detriment of all — even, eventually, of those who believe they are the strongest,” Macron told the General Assembly.

The White House said on Friday that Trump had advanced U.S. interests at the U.N., including signing a trade agreement with South Korea, the first such pact since he entered office.

“He pressed world leaders on counter-proliferation in places like Iran, North Korea and Syria; rallied them to do more to counter the opioid crisis; and made his case for peace through strength in his address to the General Assembly,” said Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Trump ruffled more than a few feathers in New York.

He accused China — not Russia — of interfering in America's upcoming mid-term election. As evidence he cited a supplement in an Iowa newspaper that was clearly identified as sponsored by China Daily, a state-run media organ.

Chinese officials were quick to note that many countries buy ads in U.S. newspapers to promote goods or policies, and they denied improper activities aimed at the November 6 election.

Trump won praise from numerous leaders for his willingness to negotiate with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a bold, if yet unsuccessful, effort to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and production facilities.

The president said he expected to hold his second summit with Kim “quite soon,” and Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo is expected to return to North Korea in coming weeks to make arrangements.

Trump had nothing but warm words for Kim, a sharp contrast to last year, when the president derided the youthful dictator as “Rocket Man” and threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea.

What some leaders see as a double standard in Trump's treatment of Iran and North Korea complicates their ability to trust Washington as a consistent partner.

Since pulling out of Iran deal in May, Trump has revived harsh economic sanctions on Tehran — and plans to impose more in November — that will make it difficult for countries to buy its oil or engage in business there.

“Trump's impetuous decision to violate the [Iran deal] — an agreement that has effectively worked to verifiably constrain Iran's nuclear weapons potential — has isolated Washington [and] angered our European allies,” said Daryl Kimball, a weapons expert who heads the Arms Control Association, a Washington policy group.

“Non-proliferation is a global challenge that requires global cooperation, dialogue and constructive U.S. leadership,” he added. “Unfortunately, Trump's non-proliferation and nuclear risk reduction policies are, so far, a dangerous mess.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Los Angeles Times staff writer Eli Stokols in Washington D.C. contributed to this report.

• Tracy Wilkinson has covered wars, crises and daily life on three continents. Her career began with United Press International, where she covered the Contra war in Nicaragua. She moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1987, first as a writer on the Metro staff, then as a foreign correspondent based in San Salvador. In 1995, she moved to Vienna, where she covered the war in the Balkans, winning the George Polk Award in 1999, and then to Jerusalem. From there, she went to Rome, where she covered two popes and did several stints in Iraq. In 2008, she became Mexico bureau chief, where her coverage was part of a team Overseas Press Club Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Wilkinson was also the 2014 winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Award for coverage of Latin America. She earned her bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University. Her book “TheVatican's Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century” has been translated into a dozen languages. She joined the L.A. Times' Washington, D.C., bureau in 2015 to cover foreign affairs.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=6f51efef-9349-4437-85b1-f25c70da07f8
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Im2Sexy4MyPants
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« Reply #19 on: October 02, 2018, 05:10:38 pm »

The UN is a worthless failed attempt at world government
lorded over by corrupt self serving commies
i dont give a fuck what they say it is bullshit
they are good for nothing
never stopped any wars
which was the excuse for them to exist in the first place
they are rubbish Grin
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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP
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« Reply #20 on: October 02, 2018, 08:11:53 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Global confidence in Trump lower than for China's Xi, poll shows

A new Pew poll finds skepticism about China's rise, but most countries
continue to have a negative view of the U.S. president.


By ADAM TAYLOR | 6:00PM EDT — Monday, October 01, 2018

President Donald J. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping tour the Forbidden City on November 8, 2017, in Beijing. — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.
President Donald J. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping tour the Forbidden City on November 8, 2017, in Beijing.
 — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.


THE Trump administration's dispute with China may have begun as a trade war, but to many, it's now something much bigger: an attempt to contain and control a rising China before it is too late.

That plan may have significant global support, if new research is to be believed. But there could also be a problem — the persistent, global unpopularity of President Trump.

Polling data from 25 countries released on Monday showed a widespread global belief that China is a growing power, perhaps one that now rivaled the United States in economic might, but that most people wanted the United States to retain its leading role in global affairs.

However, the poll also found very little confidence in the countries surveyed that the current U.S. leader would do the right thing in global affairs. Indeed, confidence in Trump was lower than for world leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Emmanuel Macron, Russia's Vladimir Putin — and even China's Xi Jinping.




The research was published on Monday by Pew Research Center as part of its ongoing research into America's public image abroad. Polling on the subject released last year had found that the median level of confidence in the U.S. president across 37 countries had tumbled from 64 percent at the end of the Obama administration to just 22 percent at the start of Trump's first term.

Though the research focused on a smaller number of countries this year, the results suggested a similarly low global approval rating for Trump — a median of 70 percent said they had no confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while 27 percent said they had confidence.

Negative views of Trump were prevalent in many traditional U.S. allies. Seventy-five percent of Canadians were found to have no confidence or not too much confidence in Trump, as were 80 percent of Swedes, 70 percent of Britons and 90 percent of both the Germans and French. The lowest positive views of Trump were found in Mexico, where just 6 percent of the country expressed confidence in his leadership.

One notable outlier was Israel, where 69 percent of the country was found to have at least some confidence in Trump to do the right thing in global affairs. In the past year, the Trump administration has implemented a number of policies that were interpreted as pro-Israeli, including the decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

But country with the highest positive views of Trump was the Philippines, with 78 percent positive. Trump has lauded his “great relationship” with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, despite widespread criticism about human rights violations in the country.

Views of the United States in general were more positive — 50 percent were favorable, compared with 43 percent unfavorable — but this was also a drop from the Obama era, when favorable views were at 64 percent. Seventy percent said that the United States did not take into account the interests of other countries, and 37 percent said that the country was doing less to address major global problems (compared with 14 percent who said the country was doing more, and 34 percent who said it was doing the same as before).




In contrast to Trump, China's Xi had the confidence of 34 percent of the world, while 56 percent had no confidence in him. Much of the world also considered China a rising global power, if not already the most important economic power.

A median of 70 percent said that China was playing a more important role in the world compared with 10 years ago, compared with only 31 percent who said the same of the United States. In a considerable number of countries — including Canada, Germany and Russia — China was already seen as the world's preeminent economic power. However, the United States held a slim advantage at the median level, with 39 percent describing it as the top global power, compared with 34 percent who listed China.

Despite Trump's unpopularity, few countries welcomed a future in which China would be the dominant power over the United States. A median of 63 percent favored U.S. leadership compared with 19 percent who favored China. Only two countries surveyed had majorities that would favor China as a dominant world power: Russia and Tunisia.

Concern for human rights might be key. Pew found that unfavorable views of China roughly correlated with concern about how the Chinese government respected the personal freedoms of its own people. Many of the countries that expressed the most negative views about China — such as neighbors Japan and South Korea, as well as European nations such as France and Germany — also had large majorities that said China restricts personal freedom.

For the Trump administration, that may be an opportunity to rally other nations against China — but its also a risk. Since the last years of the Obama administration, Pew has found a decline in the number of those who say that the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its citizens.

The trend was especially pronounced this year in Europe: In France, Germany, Poland, Spain and the United States, a combined median showed a majority (57 percent) didn't think the United States respected personal freedom. Forty percent said the United States did respect these freedoms.

The Pew Research Center survey was conducted from May to August among national random samples of 915 to 2,521 interviews in each of the 25 countries. The margin of sampling error for each country ranges from plus or minus 2.8 to 5.1 percentage points.


__________________________________________________________________________

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/01/global-confidence-trump-lower-than-chinas-xi-poll-shows
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